Books: Big Click

PHOTOBIOGRAPHY (255 pp.)—Cecil Beafon—Doubleday ($6).

Little Cecil Beaton, aged three, hopped in bed with his "Mummie" one fine English morning and ran his eye over the day's mail that lay scattered on the eiderdown. There, in the shape of a photographic postcard of a popular actress, Cecil Beaton saw his fate. "The beauty of it," he recalls in Photobiography, "caused my heart to leap...My passion for Miss Lily Elsie and my interest in photography were thus engendered at the same moment."

Cecil Beaton never got over his boyhood crushes on Miss Lily Elsie and...